Voting No secured access to the worst pension in the developed world

KILMARNOCK, SCOTLAND - SEPTEMBER 11: Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown makes the case for Scotland staying in the UK at a Better Together rally on September 11, 2014 in Kilmarnock, Scotland. Gordon Brown made a case on pensions, saying that if Scotland voted ''Yes'' in the referendum that the country's pensioners would lose a £425 million top up for their pension pot. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Yesterday I noticed a few sites sharing the latest OECD pension report showing that the UK has one of the worst mandatory pensions in the developed world.

When you look at the percentage of earnings received in retirement compared to earnings while still working, the average UK citizen is badly served by the mandatory pension system.

If you look at the graph for men, only South Africa is worse off and the situation is similar for UK women.

On seeing these reports, one couldn’t help but think of headlines like this from 2014.

It’s fairly sad that this scaremongering was ultimately designed to save one of the least generous pensions in the developed world.

The same Daily Mail that printed Brown’s pension scare story printed this yesterday.

What a dearth of imagination and ambition was shown by Better Together back in 2014. Voting to have a meagre pension subsidised by London was the best option they could dream of. It didn’t occur to them that perhaps a Scotland in control of its own immigration, tax and economic policy, could perhaps reverse the demographic issues?